


i came from the light (i will leave into the darkness)

by MagpieCrown



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Crisis of Faith, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Haphephobia, Hurt/Comfort, basically libra suffering and tharja kinda trying to help in her own way, don't mind me, haphephobia as the lesser evil, i just wanted to write the man in a lot of pain, non-romantic nudity, non-sexual nudity, tharja is slightly less horrible than she could be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-28
Updated: 2020-04-28
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:34:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23894659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagpieCrown/pseuds/MagpieCrown
Summary: "Libra looks like a man possessed - and isn’t that an apt comparison - and his eyes keep darting around, never landing on Tharja, unseeing."
Relationships: Riviera | Libra & Sallya | Tharja
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6





	i came from the light (i will leave into the darkness)

After the post-battle meeting, Tharja’s plan for the day is simple: finally change out of the sweat-encrusted clothes, bathe, and find a quiet place to read before the usual evening activities start demanding her attention. The fight took longer than they anticipated, dipping into their reserves and then some, but eventually the enemy was thrown back, and that’s all Tharja could give a single fuck about. She’s earned her rest.

Over the winter and with spring well underway now, the camp has sprawled out and grown into a mock-settlement, with decent-sized headquarters and once-neat rows of huts overgrowing with extensions, lean-tos, debris, and other evidence of life, so it’s easy to find a secluded spot for a few hours. So what Tharja has is an easy, clear-cut plan, molded after the shape of her and her own company, fitting better than any glove, and an area with ample opportunity to execute it.

The plan, however, shatters when Libra collides with her on the way outside.

“What the hell- watch yourself!” Tharja snaps, pushing back against his pauldrons - noticing now that he’s still in full armour, hours after the battle. Still drenched in blood, even about the face, and well away from the Shepherds’ tidy little street - what the hell, indeed?

Libra makes a gutted, inhuman sound. It takes Tharja an ice-hot, reeling moment to realize that he is crying - not the joyous tears of exaltation during his prayers, not the gentle, graceful weeping over the rows of fallen soldiers, but the violent, merciless quakes wracking his body with the force akin to what moves tectonic plates.

He shudders breath after convulsive breath, and the folds of his still-buckled short cloak move like ocean waves above a distant earthquake. Tharja watches them crash into the shore, tug at her feet, and knows: something is very wrong.

“Hey, what got you so harried?” she calls to plates grinding under the ocean water, leans in to try to see through the murk.

Libra looks like a man possessed - and isn’t that an apt comparison - and his eyes keep darting around, never landing on Tharja, unseeing.

“I don’t-” he clasps her shoulders suddenly, hard enough to make Tharja wince, leans on her like a crutch, like he’s forgotten how to stand, like the floor is dissolving underneath him. “I don’t hear her. She has - she has left me, she is not with me.” The words tumble out of Libra in a strangled staccato, he’s been sliced open and there is nothing to stop the flow. “She is not with me, I didn’t - I should’ve - I  _ failed, _ ” he sags leadenly, making Tharja strain her back to keep her frame from buckling under his armour-plated weight. “I failed her.”

So it’s about Naga. “What happened? How did you fail her?” Tharja suppresses a cringe at the crude words: this way, he won’t get better- that is, she won’t shake him off any time soon.

Libra emits something between a howl and a whimper, a wounded animal trailing intestines, and tightens his fingers in a crack of leather - this is going to bruise…

“Libra,” the name rolls off Tharja’s tongue, her voice pitched lower now, trying to find the frequency in which he’s shivering apart right in front of her eyes. “Libra, look at me.”

But he still won’t - won’t hear, won’t look. The line of his gaze is hard and uncrossable, unattainable, shimmering away from hers like a misaligned magnet, because it’s not Tharja he’s trying to find, she’s not his North Pole.

And yet he is here. In this stupid hallway of these stupid headquarters, tracking in mud, shedding dried blood, because North Pole or no, it’s Tharja he homes in on when his darkness swells like the tide or a bruise and calls on hers.

Tharja forgets for a moment - stupidly, dangerously - remembers in the next free-falling breath when it’s too late, when her hand is already touching the short stubble on his jaw. Libra jerks away before she can, freezes with his eyes slitted in sudden, quiet agony, and then deliberately pushes his face back into her hand. His eyelids finally, mercifully slide shut as he drowns out the onslaught with a chosen kind of torture.

Tharja hesitates, questions, accepts - all in the span of a breath leaving her - and lifts another hand, frames Libra’s face in a benediction, an offering, and he dives in, deranged, for what she cups in her narrow hands for him, pays with dried blood from his cheeks. With a wet sound his lungs crackle back to life - Tharja hasn’t even noticed he stopped breathing - but this is a gasp of a shock from ice water, not from a cliff crumbling mercilessly under his feet.

Libra is crying again, quieter now but no less urgent; his hands slowly unclench and fall by his sides, and Tharja doesn’t know if the tingle in her fingers comes from his stubble or from the blood rushing up her arms. It doesn’t matter. Libra is towering over her like a cracking statue, held together by their point of contact, still locked away in his bottomless grief, still blind.

What Tharja is doing is not enough. She could step away from almost anyone else. But - she can admit it to herself - Libra is her friend, he is her - someone. 

The solution comes to Tharja in a familiar flash of brilliance, and she drags and pushes him down the hallway and into the armoury. The door falls closed behind them, no latch on the inside, no key, but Tharja doesn’t bother: the armoury looks full, so chances of someone running late and barging in on them are low.

Under her hands the quakes continue, fierce enough to make her fear Libra’s body tearing itself apart in the storm. He doesn’t show any recognition of where they are or how they got here, he is not here at all.

“Come on, time to undress,” Tharja’s hands leave his face; he whines and tries to follow, and Tharja bites away the pang of bitterly acidic pity. “Bloody hell, work with me here.”

She manages to unbuckle the cloak and undo the fastenings of the pauldrons and the chestplate, but Libra needs to help her.

“Move, I said!” Tharja hisses and nudges his arms. Libra lifts them slowly, dazedly, and she pulls the light chest and back pieces over his head and only barely doesn’t throw them to the ground, carefully pissed off, her actions a smoke screen to herself. 

Tharja is being cruel, she knows she is, but at least he’s complying, even if his gaze is still turned inwards, probing at the bloody gap where Naga’s presence used to be.

Without his armor, Libra is left in his linen shirt and a wool-padded jacket, still-gauntleted arms hanging awkwardly by his sides. No chainmail, the bloody  _ idiot, _ but for her purpose it is actually better this way.

Before Tharja can overthink this, or before Libra can miraculously come to his senses and be all reasonable again, she unfastens her cloak, in several quick, decisive motions tears the front of her dress all the way down, undoes the ties of Libra’s jacket and shirt, and slides up along his front, her cold hands moving up his back, mapping out unfamiliar scars, pressing down flat.

Libra gasps again, his ribcage seizing in her hold like a ship splintering on the rocks, heart hammering against her chest. His head is thrown back as he tries to suck in air, and his hands spasm, tangle in her cloak, rise up in jerky movements until they find her shoulder blades, until the moment on the precipice passes and Libra falls from it and crushes Tharja to his chest, lowering his head to her shoulder.

Tharja’s face is uncomfortably smushed into the side of his neck, their naked skin immediately starts sweating in the trap of wool and linen and cotton and very many wet, ragged breaths (their naked skin, holy shit), her spine is contorted into an abominable shape by Libra’s hulking form - it’s utterly horrible and the worst idea ever.

But Libra’s shivers against her grow shallower as long minutes roll by, his hands flex on her back with slowly returning awareness, and maybe it doesn’t fix his tragedy, but it’s a start.


End file.
